Hi Charles,
Going through our summer and winter squash harvest, this week I noticed only a few courgettes have remained and these are in miserable condition(yellow, soggy and partly mouldy), so I decided to give the Patty Pan scallop squash a go.
I found it very healthy looking fruit. The skin is very hard and therefore even after several months storage it looks like fresh. I cut it with a bread knife and grated the flesh and cooked it with eggs from our chickens like an omelette with some grated cheese, dried herbs(tarragon and basil) and pepper and few fresh sage leaves from allotment as garnish. It was delicious and much much tastier than the ones I made from courgettes!
If I want to rate it I will rate all other courgettes at 3 and the Patty Pan at 7. My slight nagging is that the skin is much harder and for grating I had to cut it into smaller bit to avoid rubbing the hard skin on grater(which of course this hard skin helps it superb juicy preservation).
We have cooked this meal with some of the 8 varieties of courgettes we planted this year and Patty Pan so far is the best. Patty Pan squash of course is not a courgette, but both belong to the same family of squashes called Cucubrita pepo.
Patty Pan has a kind of slightly sweeter and denser flesh than courgettes. It looks also very different, almost like a flying saucer or pie! Its plant is very productive and each plant gives up to 10 squashes (I lost count and it may be even more as we were passing them to friends who liked them for their funny shapes and superb courgettey taste).
I am sending some photos.
Merry Christmas to you and family!
